Wake up Euroleague: What's wrong with an NBA-style play-off series to determine the champions?

The Euroleague's Final Four - to determine the champions of Europe's top level of professional basketball - begins on Friday with the final on Sunday night. Maccabi Tel Aviv will play the first semi-final against Montepaschi Siena of Italy, and CSKA Moscow will play Tau Ceramica of Vittoria, Spain, in the nightcap.

One game to decide the champions for professional basketball in Europe? I hate it!

Okay, I understand the Final Four concept for NCAA college basketball. After all, these are "student-athletes" (let's not debate that for the moment), and they are supposed to be in school, as are their classmates, and you can't disrupt entire universities for a best-of-seven series, and who would have the home court advantage, yada, yada, yada.

But one game to determine the champions in Europe's top league? Are you kidding me? Why not a series? Will Siena play off for the Italian championship - assuming they get there - in just one game? CSKA Moscow? Tau Vittoria? Of course not - almost all countries in Europe have a best-of-five play-off series (Israel being the exception - they also have a silly Final Four format).

To anyone slightly familiar with the game of basketball, we all know that in one game anything can happen - as we have seen a number of times in the college game (see: NC State, Villanova, etc.). We got a good taste of that this year: Were Kansas really better than Memphis? A series - not feasible for the college game - would have determined this better than one game.

So of course, this begs the obvious question - why have a Final Four to determine the champions? While I have heard supposed economic justifications for this, involving TV etc, I have never seen any numbers to support such a theory.

What really drives the Final Four is European basketball's need to have a huge social event where they can wine and dine (not many places better to do that than this year in Madrid), toss back some fine Rioja, pat each other on the back, maybe do a bit of business and in between watch a little basketball.

To be fair, the NBA does this, too, but they do it at the All-Star game mid-season and don't interfere with the game itself at the end of the season.

How can you compare the drama of a play-off series with a one-game final? Every series seems to play out with some sort of story line that builds up from the beginning and develops in many cases in strange and unexpected ways. Those story lines often linger in the memories of fans for years to come and become part of the important folklore that drives the tradition of teams and the league itself.

Euroleague, in fact, experimented with a play-off series in its very first year of existence in 2000 - when it was young and feisty. Kinder Bologna beat Tau Vittoria in a great five-game series (Manu Ginobili and Luis Scola were the stars of the two teams, respectively - anyone remember them?).

The next year European top-level basketball went back to a Final Four format and Panathinaikos of Athens beat Bologna in a one-game final 89-83. The big winners since have been those few hundred league and team honchos, who enjoy a few days of (some very good) cocktail parties and dinners.

The losers of course are the fans and European basketball, which just can't seem to grow up.

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